


Being and Time

by SpecialTrampAgentOtters (Elsie1285)



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Episode: s07e10 Sein Und Zeit, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-03
Updated: 2016-11-03
Packaged: 2018-08-28 19:55:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,086
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8460925
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsie1285/pseuds/SpecialTrampAgentOtters
Summary: Scully performs Teena Mulder's autopsy, as requested.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Being and Time: Hands
> 
> A (very late) response to Leiascully’s X Files Writing Challenge Prompt: Touch.

It’s a myth that the more autopsies a medical examiner conducts, the easier it becomes; one might become hardened, less easily shocked. But it’s never easy. It never stops feeling like an intrusion. If she could choose one word to describe it, it might be that it has become routine. That is not to say that death itself is routine, nor that the fact of violent or unexpected death is standard or common. It is more that the actual act of performing an examination becomes habitual, a regimen to be followed. Trace the path of enough breadcrumbs and eventually all secrets are revealed, even those from beyond the grave. If she’s lucky, justice will be done. If that isn’t the ultimate homage to the legacy lying on the table, Dana Scully isn’t sure what is. 

Until Fox Mulder pleads with her to scrutinize and examine his mother’s body. 

Scully’s hands, usually still and sure, tremble as she catalogues Teena Mulder’s basic information: sex, age, height, weight. She moves on to his mother’s distinguishing marks: a mole here; birthmark there. There are the silver-fish scars of stretch marks under the loose folds of elderly skin on her abdomen: a testament to the children she bore and, a decade later, forgot to continue to raise. Mrs Mulder’s cheeks are lined with age but her skin is soft: expensive potions and lotions and a lifetime of privilege go a long way in preserving the youth of one’s face. But look closer; even in the frigid air of the county morgue, there is the tell-tale reddish hue marring the crisp, pale visage, the stippling along the throat and chest. There are only so many sensations alcohol dependence can dull and Teena Mulder had every reason to pursue numbness.

Scully’s always thought she is the lucky one of the partnership. Her job is simple, straightforward, easily definable. Until this evening. 

As she lifts one of the hands she notes the smudges of ink on Mrs Mulder’s finger tips, her usually spotless veneer blemished by the dissection of her death. Her suicide is so textbook as to be glaringly obvious: the oven; the pills. However, Mulder’s insistence that Teena was murdered has raised suspicions and the local coroner is taking no chances with his report. Scully parses the lines on the older woman’s palm, reading the life of Mulder’s mother. Like her son’s, Teena Mulder’s fingers are long, probably expressive in their gesticulations. Like her countenance, they too are lined with age but are too soft for working hands. These are not hands that have scrubbed the clothes of warring children, sodden with mud or grime. They have not soaked in bleach the numerous shirts of a family of Military men. These are hands that are manicured and cared for. They are ineffectual hands that fluttered over her small son when he cried, the tools with which she pleaded with Bill Mulder not to sacrifice her only daughter. These are the physical barrier pushing her adolescent child away when his anguish invaded the haze of gin with which she cloaked herself in his teenage years. This is the palm connecting with his defiant visage in Massachusetts in April 1997 when he begged for answers she had locked away eons before. These are the digits that dialled his number too late, just last week. It was with these fingers that she set about leaving Fox Mulder an orphan in his already tattered world. 

As she replaces Teena’s arm by her side, Scully considers how they are the antithesis of Maggie Scully’s papery, hardened extremities. Years of maintaining sandy earth in the gardens of coastal base housing, attempting minor DIY projects while her husband was at sea, and a near constant mountain of household chores to work through have rendered Dana’s mother’s hands strong and quick: as nimble with a needle and thread as with an antiseptic bandage on a grazed knee or a sharp slap to the backside of a petulant child. Maggie’s life is mapped out in the contours of her hands: weather beaten from endless days by a baseball field, softened from years of cold compresses and tears swept from sticky cheeks. She could read the braille of her mother’s callouses and see them wringing with worry as Ahab was at sea; tapping out a discordant, apprehensive timbre every time she has heard Fox Mulder’s voice on the phone; salt-stained from years of grief for the physical and metaphorical loss of her family around her. Her fingernails, now, are smooth and polished, but there was little time for that when Scully was growing up; she learnt to apply nail varnish from Melissa, not from her mother. Maggie’s hands were always too occupied in cooking large family meals, gathering her brood around the kitchen table at mealtimes as she listened to the excited chatter of school and college, to be concerned with aesthetics. Now, Scully worries, there is plenty of time for manicures; her offspring scattered to the four winds or gone entirely, and Maggie Scully spends many a day on her own, despite most of her remaining children’s best efforts. 

Scully’s hands, blush against the marble of Teena’s wintery skin, resemble Maggie’s more than she has noticed before. Scully favours simple, natural manicures, her nails short nowadays through necessity. One never knows what Mulder will ask her to unearth - often literally - from day to day. The years have taken their toll: the chill of the scalpel an extension of her own fingers; chemicals used to stall decomposition; cheap talc inside latex gloves; manhandling frozen bodies on the slab. Since the biting chill of her cancer stalked her veins, she has found her hands are almost always cool to the touch, a fact she only notices when she traces Mulder’s face, or lips, with the pads of her fingers. His skin is kindling in dry climates, setting her extremities alight, like returning home from outside on a bitter December evening to find a fire in the hearth. Her fingertips tingle almost painfully with the muscle-memory, how she still aches to track the path of her thumb across his full lower lip with her tongue, drinking him in. But they have always conversed with their touches: his palm flat and full, a conflagration at the base of her spine as he guides her; her fingers twisted like filigree through his at the takeoff and touchdown of all their flights; the simple brush of his fingers peeling the hair from the back of her neck, feverish as she retched and moaned after chemotherapy sessions; the swipe of her digits through dark umber strands of hair as he leaned into her after John Lee Roche and his trip down the rabbit hole. Scully idly wonders when the last time was that Teena Mulder touched her son through anything other than obligation. She wonders if he wonders the same.

She knows the last time she felt Mulder’s lean hands on her skin. After the new Millennium whimpered in with the aroma of disinfectant, a silent hospital corridor and the chaste press of his lips to hers, he had thrown his good arm around her shoulder and guided her from the building, a covert smile tickling the edges of the subconscious pout he still harbored. Somehow each of them had maintained physical contact throughout the journey as they had gravitated back to his apartment, where the air was charged and crackling. He had worshipped her that night, his injured arm forgotten as he made her hum and fizz with his deft, ambidextrous fingers and savouring mouth, trailing supernovas across her skin. She had coiled herself around him, feline and arched as he lit her core ablaze with his tongue. And when she came, his name sizzling on her lips, his rugged palm pressed hers to the bed, pulse point against pulse point. She could feel the golden ridge of his life line against hers, a wildfire of confluence. Since then two motel rooms are requisitioned and one lies unused; her apartment stands empty on too many nights to make it worth considering the value of her rent; she has grown accustomed to the indentation of his head on the pillow next to hers and the heavy, proprietary weight of his paw against her hip as he sleeps; and she has woken, gasping, in the middle of the night, as his mouth parts her thighs and drinks from her like elixir. But the last touch she remembers is the desperate grasp of Mulder’s fingers, strong and ferocious. Leaving Teena Mulder’s house, her shoulder rubbing against his ramrod bicep, he had gripped her hand, squeezing too tight, inducing a wince. His eyes had sought hers, words superfluous: do right by her, his gaze had pleaded. 

So here she is, knuckles raised to knock on his door, her hands empty: nothing to tell him. She cannot lie, cannot tell him what he wants to hear. Teena Mulder wanted to die, by her own hands.

The brass 42 rattles as the door swings open and he stalks away from her into the living room as she watches the swell of his muscles break and flex under his soft, ash t-shirt. She steeples her fingers under her nose and his hands grip his upper arms, crossing his chest, a dam against the rising doubt he reads in her eyes as he spins his tale. Scully sits opposite and her fingertips twitch, longing to grasp and shelter him. Instead, she watches him crumble as her words meld in his consciousness, the flame of hope he held flickering and extinguishing as he registers the unavoidable: the last surviving Mulder has gone, and he is alone. 

Anguish pools in his fists and the desk shudders under the weight of his grief, before he melts back into the welcoming safety of the couch. Scully’s resolve shatters and his elbow is encased in her grappling fingers, struggling to pin him down as he pounds the couch, until he stills. Her thumb worries rings on his sallow skin, and she reaches for his fingers, wrapping them in hers as she guides him into her embrace. She cups the back of his head as his brow weighs heavy on her shoulder, his body folded protectively into itself, keening like a wounded animal. She can feel herself rocking backwards and forwards on her heels and her calf muscles protest, but they are statues, curled around each other for an interminable amount of time. 

When he finally raises his tawny head his gaze is searching, hungry, and his lips find hers immediately. She can feel his desperation as he wrestles her jacket to the ground, teeth nipping at her collar and his breath coming in short, sharp bursts against her neck as a wave of ardor shoots through her body, straight to her centre. She tries to pull away, dragging her torso away from him as his lips chase after the pulse in her jugular. 

“Mulder…” Her voice cracks as she struggles to control her breathing. “I’m not sure…”

“Make it stop, Scully. I need you to make it stop.” His red-rimmed eyes meet hers, and the raw devastation in them brings her up sharp. She nods, once and licks her lips, nervously. 

Then he is all over her. His masculine nails scrape her scalp through her hair with his right hand, while his left swipes through her shirt, grazing her nipples as she arches beneath his touch. Their hands are everywhere and there is no finesse: within seconds he has unzipped his fly and she can feel him, bobbing against the waistband of her suit pants. He scrabbles to pull down her pants and underwear and then he fills her. She can feel herself clench around him as he shoves her onto the edge of the desk and thrusts into her again and again. His thumb finds her middle and grinds against it mercilessly until, with one final growl, he comes with his mouth against her shoulder and she follows, whimpering into his hair as she sketches wings onto his shoulder blades. He raises his eyes to hers again and his implicit trust causes a lump in her throat. 

“You’re all I have now, Scully.” He is hoarse and solemn, and she tries to swallow past the golf-ball keeping her from breathing normally.

She can feel the weight of his heart in her hands and her lips graze his forehead in benediction, a promise to keep it safe; whatever comes.


End file.
